Later, my master gave me ten days of rest to prepare myself for the third test, the last and extremely difficult one. In that period, I relished different types of foodstuff that I had never tasted during my days in the hermitage. My master had ensured that drinks made of different aromatic herbs was given continually to me during that period. They kept my body cool and awfully tired, requiring sleep of many days, and numb like wood so that the body wouldn’t roll out on sand while sleeping, thus leaving the clothes sloppy and lying haphazardly. When I received all these from the hands of my master’s daughter—here sitting beside me as my wife—they had kept me in a long, deeply resting sleep as the titillating dreams kept coming out of me. I was proud, disdainfully though, of those treatments given to me for passing the second stage of the test without any adverse remarks. Only a little later could I understand that those compliments were hiding in them the scent of treachery, like the way the sacrificial goat is offered with the new clothes, perfumes, and garlands. To corroborate this, my blood became almost frozen when I heard my master’s advice and directives for the test on the day I was getting ready to face the third stage of the test. I was terribly stunned at what he had said. My master told me, unlike the first two stages, that the craft wouldn’t be used on the animal that was subjected to the third stage during its dull moments when the food was getting digested in its stomach. Further, he said, “My dear student, you have already learnt thoroughly what the animals see in their dreams and how those dreams are born and disappear in it. Now, you are going to know them in human language. You must understand that you have now been assigned the tremendous task of passing this to the future generations the way our ancestors - who had converted the animals’ dreams into words and given them to us in the form of scriptures—did. The animals don’t create their dreams only in sleep like the humans do. They undertake tiny, temporary sleeps in every specific moment of their life and then perceive the worlds of those moments as their dreams and enjoy them. So, at times, you will lose your sixth sense while attempting to read the dreams of a ‘five-senses’ animal. Let you be mingled with all the places it moves, all the scenes it sees, all the places it visits, the food it eats, and all the moments it indulges in sex. Only at that time will you understand how this universe is perceived in the eyes of animals, which create dreams every moment and leave them in the form of this universe. The day when you are satisfied that you are able to convert those complex colours you had seen in the first stage of the test into words and the scents into chants, you would come back to me again.”
My master, then, bought the same cow he had subjected to experiment during the first two stages of the test from its owner for some amount, removed its nose-rope, ferrules in the horn, drape on its face, and cloth on its body, and wiped off the vermillion and the patterns drawn on it from its forehead, rendered it completely nude, and made it walk along with me in the front. Terribly shocked at his order to take my clothes off to get nude, I begged him to allow me to wear at least a loincloth. That saint, who knew all three dimensions of the universe, first vehemently denied my request but later allowed only a small loincloth, mumbling some words out of his discomfort with it. From that day, I was following the cow like its shadow. O courtiers! It was not a day, not a season; it was two complete cycles of summer. Through the jungles, urban areas, depths of water bodies, ridges, fields, and shrewdness of people who allowed it to enter their houses and accumulated their fortunes by giving it jaggery, rice, and coconut stalks during special occasions, I was following the white cow as an ascetic having no bond other than the cow. When it was chewing its food, I saved myself from the severity of cold generated during the clash of seasonal cycles inside its dreams. Neither did I eat nor sleep during that entire period. Before this experiment, the sleep and hunger induced by the aromatic drinks prepared by my master’s daughter—my present wife—during the time I thought was most enjoyable in my life were actually fed to me as medicines to take a toll on my eyelids and stomach at the time of the experiment, which I understood later. The cow I was following remained completely indifferent, as if it wasn’t aware of someone following it, and lay and rolled out wherever it wanted. It slept with its eyes open. It found its happiness in drowning in the water bodies, covering its nude body with sand, and then shedding the dried sand. During winter, it used the exhalation on its body to keep its interiors warm. During summer, it licked its snout where the inhalation takes place, thus making the air cool before making it enter its body, and ejected out the excess heat by twitching its skin. As these actions of the cow, which were otherwise impossible tasks by the humans, kept teasing my intellect and insulting me incessantly, the urge to complete the experiments as soon as possible and go back to my place began badgering me. (Only after my marriage did I understand that my urge to go back home had in fact been burning like fire due to the thought about my master’s daughter). This forced me to resort to a foolish act of deliberately bringing the experiment to an abrupt end by way of hastily converting the cow’s actions into words. I tended to believe that apart from those jaggery, rice, coconut, grass, and hay that appeared as dreams in front of the cow roaming nude, even the air, temperature, and other sundry scenes were also looking like its food. It first appeared to me in the first autumn during the period of experiment that the cow identified anything that came in front of it by sniffing and licking. I caught the cow, which was walking in front of me, reined it with the rope inserted through its nostrils, and walked on haughtily holding the rope’s knots and reached my master. My age blocked my vision from realising the biggest mistake I was making. I announced before him, proudly, that the animals perceived this world as their food and their dreams brought taste to anything they saw. Only when I saw my master falling unconscious on the patterns drawn on the floor in the front yard with his eyes blocked, losing his balance at the very moment of my boastful declaration, did I understand my mistake. The moment I came to know that my failure was so poisonous that it could bring death to my master, I began to hate myself. Before this woman—my master’s daughter who later became my wife—came to the front yard searching for her father, I tossed the nose-rope and my loincloth onto the ground as a telltale sign of my presence there and left that place immediately with a pledge that I would return as a victor before my master could regain his consciousness.
My education, which should have been completed within one cycle of the season, got into another cycle due to my foolishness and arrogance, which thus invited unwanted troubles in life. Since I gave up the piece of cloth that was used to cover my genital from dangling along my thighs, I had lost the least number of words to share them with others, which the confidence of having that cloth offered me. Along with the animal that led me, I also completely entered the world of no words and distinctions. But at the same time, I had to remain with the consciousness of a human in order to create the words I came across by being away from that world. My total nudity taught me that the real test had just begun. Now, I could hear the words my master mumbled when I refused to take off my loincloth. Haven’t I told you that I had understood in the first test that the universe appearing in the dreams of the animals was full of complex colours and scents? Now I could see them assuming particular colours and scents at specific times. I could progress faster in a very short time to become an animal that enabled me to see the dreams of a cow turning red and dark when it chewed its food. In the eyes of the cow, this world appeared red and dark when it drank water by dropping its cone-shaped face into the water till its eyes were drowned, cleaned its breath by lifting its face against the wind, wallowed in mud full of putrid stuff due to rain and small insects, and gave its body to some small birds to pick the ticks. Along with it, as my surprise shot up, I could enjoy a comforting, warm temperature coming out of those dreams. That temperature was ringing into my ears a heavy serenity not heard in any corner of the world. It troubled me as if it was very familiar to me and something that had disappeared from my memory due to some curse. I could understand that, being an animal among the animals; though I was unable to decode how they perceived this universe in their dreams into words, I was still able to see them as scenes in my view. I was hopeful that I would be able to discover a device that could capture the dreams into a language. Very soon I got that opportunity. But what actually happened was that it was the device that found me on its way as its tool. The device that had found me was a dark bull whose eyes looked like that of a chaste woman. When I and the cow were on our usual journey through a region that couldn’t be termed either a village or a town, suddenly we saw a well-grown bull—with toned, rounded twin humps, sharp horns looking upward as if tearing off the sky, broad thighs, reddened eyes, and a massively drooling mouth—coming in between us. Before I could regain my senses from the shock, that mammoth male animal that stood hiding the cow from my view touched me with its erect pizzle, licked me, and pushed me aside. Then it mounted on the cow with its front legs up and pulled the cow to its side like a thunderbolt falling upon a tree. I saw as I was falling onto the ground that the cow’s body, in reflex, was shrinking small in size and finding its place between the bull’s legs, and its dreams were turning reddish dark hastily. In the eyes of the bull that still remained mounted on the cow from the rear, were reflected the same reddish dark dreams spilling out everywhere. That time too, the temperature I was familiar with and later forgot came out of that dream and fell on me. Conquering my arrogance of my age that made my master fall unconscious, I was just watching all these events patiently lying on the ground. Very shortly I understood that the bull which abruptly came in between to separate the cow from me, earning my momentary wrath, was actually sent by the god to unite me with the victory. Losing no synchronicity, as if declaring that the universe was nothing but the world of animals’ dreams, which was not about getting closer after parting but about dipping and ascending, the bull was performing its vertical moves of that world on the cow’s rear. After a long time, the bull brought its heavy frame to the ground that shook with its weight and turned its eyes—that had turned normal, losing its reddish darkness—toward me and glanced at me lovingly. The white cow that had never even turned a glance at me all throughout the journey, for the first time, turned its eyes welling up with the tears of love towards me. As the cow was standing at its place, the bull came near me as I lay down, threw its warm breath onto my body, licked it with its tongue curling all over, and spoke to me in an elegant language of the nature that belonged to the ‘wordless’ world. Soon it shrank and disappeared in the wind the way it had appeared. Before my mind could understand its language, my phallus grew erect and extended towards the cow without my initiative, as though my body had understood that language. Immensely happy, I got up, cried, and pounced on the cow, which was awaiting me with its open vulva lips. Placing my palms firmly on its back, I lifted my body and inserted my penis into its vulva, from where the sperm of the bull was still dripping. With the reflex of having been released from my body, my penis entered the cow’s body, rubbing its flesh, tissues, layer of fat, blood, and the tender nerves in its interior, growing longer than my height. At last, with the eyes of my phallus, I saw the real appearance of the universe, which the animals perceive every time with the help of each sweat pore on their bodies.
To be continued…
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